Juuli Partanen IMMERSIVE DETAILS IN GAMES And how to apply them Bachelor’s thesis Degree programme in Game Design 2021 Author (authors) Degree title Time Juuli Partanen Bachelor of Culture March 2021 and Arts Thesis title 62 pages Immersive Details in Games 13 pages of appendices And how to apply them Commissioned by - Supervisor Sarah-Jane Leavey Abstract Immersion and the ways it works is a much discussed topic especially in the game industry. To understand how immersion is implemented into games, immersive details and elements were investigated. Each element of game design is present when discussing immersive details such as environment design, narrative design, character design, and sound design. With all elements working together in detail work, as many human senses are activated as possible, which creates a highly immersive experience. To see how personal immersion is and if it can be measured, a survey and interviews were conducted. Conclusions of both showed that while immersion and how it is seen varies from person to person, there are certain elements in games that players actively notice and appreciate. Other details may go unnoticed but may be observed on an unconscious level. Keywords immersion, narrative design, character design, sound design, environment design CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 4 2 RESEARCH METHDOS ............................................................................................... 4 3 WHAT IMMERSION IS ................................................................................................. 6 4. HOW IMMERSION IS BUILT IN GAMES 4.1 Environment design ................................................................................................. 8 4.2 Character design .................................................................................................. 11 4.3 Narrative design .................................................................................................... 14 4.4 Sound design ........................................................................................................ 16 4.5 Case study : The Sexy Brutale .............................................................................. 17 4.6 Case study :Phasmophobia .................................................................................. 20 5. RESEARCH ANALYSIS 5.1 Survey ................................................................................................................... 23 5.2 Interview ............................................................................................................... 28 6 APPLYING IMMERSIVE DETAILS ............................................................................. 35 7 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 43 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................. 44 LIST OF FIGURES APPENDICES 4 1 INTRODUCTION How a player gets immersed into a videogame is a concept constructed of many variables that create a highly personal experience. All parts of game design play a part in immersive experience but can also break the illusion if not done correctly. A junior game designer may find themselves in a situation where their product accidentally breaks player immersion due to neglecting details that consumers pick up on actively and unconsciously. This paper is a look into the vast concept of immersion and the tool games use to build a solid foundation for it. It also provides examples and guidance for adding immersion into an existing game world. 2 RESEARCH METHODS Finding out what immersive details mean and how they could be added into a game world requires first knowledge of what immersion is and how players react to it. In this paper immersion is looked through a lens that combines visual storytelling, writing and environment design. The multidisciplinary nature of the topic means there is a need to use various research methods in order to gain greater understanding of how these building blocks work to form a cohesive experience. Both quantitative and qualitative information were needed to measure how and why players felt immersed while playing. For this purpose, a brief survey on playing habits and immersion was made on Webropol to collect primary data. For qualitative data, four of the survey attendants were asked for an interview in which their personal experiences of immersion were discussed in more detail. The interview also included two experiments to test key theories presented in this paper. Lastly, to collect data on how games build immersion, an analysis was conducted on two already existing products. 5 The survey was conducted on November 11 and ran for a week. It was distributed on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and various game related Discord channels. Overall, the survey gained 89 attendees. The survey consisted of eleven questions of which nine were compulsory. Out of the eleven questions seven were multiple choice and three were five-point Likert scale. The goal was to be able to make a rough player profile for each attendee and look at how different profiled players find immersion in video games. Attendees were able to access the survey both on phone and on computer and it took from five to ten minutes to complete unless the attendee decided to write in the optional text box at the end of the survey. Interviews were conducted between several days in November. Four participants were selected from volunteers who had filled out the immersion survey. The interviews were conducted online and recorded due to Covid-19. While structured, the interviews were designed to encourage conversation. Participants’ answers from the survey were looked at and personalized questions were made from their answers on top of generic questions. Interviewees were also told they could add to and discuss any of the topics that came up in the interview. Each interview took approximately 30 minutes and the recording was done with OBS Studio. The interview also included two experiments. The first experiment tested the schemata theory by Gard (2010). It consisted of two pieces of digital concept art painted with Adobe Photoshop CS6. They both featured a street view with similar composition and colour scheme but had differing environmental details. The participants were firstly told the context of the pictures: the location of the environment and the era. Participants were asked to look at one picture at a time for 5 seconds. After seeing both the pictures, participants were asked which one of them they preferred and if they were able to tell why. 6 The second experiment was made to investigate a proposition made by Ferrari in Game Developer Conference, in which he suggested that rather than making old looking game’s graphics accurate to said era, the graphics should reflect the nostalgia. Participants were shown three screen captures from existing video games from different eras with similar art style and were asked which one of the art styles they would prefer in a video game. Participants were also asked why they chose the particular picture and what they liked about it. They were also allowed to tell why they did not choose the other two and what they disliked in said pictures. Two existing games were analysed from the thesis’ point of view: The Sexy Brutale (2017) and Phasmophobia (2020). These products handled immersion in their own way that was found useful as material for this paper. Other analysed material was in text and video form and included especially articles and conference papers. These materials were used as a theory basis. 3 WHAT IMMERSION IS To build upon something, it is important to investigate the foundations first. Immersion, or what psychologists would describe as spatial presence, is the experience of a player feeling as if being part of the game they are playing (Madigan 2012). It can be built in various ways and while there is no one formula to always achieve player immersion with every individual, there are categories and details which can help different kinds of players to feel immersed. There is discussion on if the correct term for the experience is immersion, presence, or even flow. In this paper, the term used is immersion as it is widely accepted and used term in the game industry (Ermi & Mäyrä 2005). Because of how personal experience immersion is, studies have concluded to a model of three tiers on immersion. Engagement, engrossment, and total immersion are used to describe individuals’ level of immersion. Engagement at the lowest immersion tier means the level of investing time and effort into the 7 game and paying attention. Engrossment includes engagement but adds the emotional investment into it and at final stage total immersion means what players normally describe as immersion; the feeling of being so invested that they lose the sense of their real surroundings. (Bowman 2018.) Due to this multi-layered understanding of immersion, it can be found as a large factor even in games that are not traditionally thought as immersive, such as multiplayer games and fighting games. There are various models describing what happens when we become immersed. However, one of these models specifically looks at how and why spatial presence is unique to media and games and different from presence (Wirth et al. 2007). The theory relies heavily